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Chicago Tribune
(MCT)
HOUSTON - Most people probably don't recall that one of the munchkins in "The Wizard of Oz" was a mortician. But Bob Boetticher Sr. knows. In fact, he has a life-size, costumed mannequin of the undersize undertaker perched in a corner of his office at the National Museum of Funeral History.
"There are only four munchkins still left, and Meinhardt Raabe, who played the coroner, is one of them," said Boetticher, the museum president. "Once he passes away, then we will probably put him out on display."
You don't have to be dead to get into this museum. But it helps.
Hidden inside a nondescript brick building on the north edge of Houston, next door to a training school for aspiring funeral directors, the funeral museum is easy enough to whistle right past. But for the 8,000 or so visitors who make their way here each year, the rewards are eternal.
There are few other places, for example, where the public can learn about the rich history of embalming, which, in the 1920s, entailed the use of a slanted table with a hole in the bottom and a bucket. (The details are left largely to the imagination.)
There are more than a dozen funeral hearses, from horse-drawn carriages to the 1973 Mercedes-Benz model used to ferry Princess Grace of Monaco to her grave.
There's even a strand of hair extracted from the fatal bullet wound in President Abraham Lincoln's head.
"I bought that one on eBay," said Boetticher. "I don't recall what it cost. But it's been authenticated."
The museum, one of only two in the nation devoted to the history of the funeral industry (the other is in Springfield, Ill.), opened in 1992 and is operated by Service Corp. International, or SCI, a huge funeral service conglomerate headquartered in Houston. And although the museum's motto, adopted from a defunct mausoleum company, is humorous - "Any Day Above Ground is a Good One" - the facility strives to maintain a certain level of good taste.
That means empty caskets of all shapes and styles are OK, as are such bizarre artifacts as 19th-century pieces of jewelry fashioned from the hair of deceased loved ones and "ice caskets" used to preserve bodies in the days before chemical embalming was invented. (Picture a very long, narrow beer cooler made of tin.)
But other rarities stored in the museum's collection may never see the light of day, such as the table used to embalm Elvis Presley.
"How do you display that tastefully and appropriately?" asked Boetticher, a funeral director for 43 years. "Is it really part of the history of the funeral industry? These are the questions we grapple with."
Presidential funerals are a special focus of the museum, largely because SCI is often contracted by the federal government to conduct them. Thus there is a display featuring the "710 President Mahogany Casket" - the model used for Presidents Kennedy and Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, among others - which weighs more than 400 pounds and features an interior of pearl velvet.
The Ronald Reagan funeral collection is as deep as it is quirky, including a pair of black leather boots worn by a member of the military caisson team, a red necktie worn by one of the mourners at the funeral and a wind strap - basically a long black rubber band - used to secure the flag on the president's coffin.
The abundance of Reagan artifacts is largely explained by Boetticher's central role at the June 2004 funeral: As the director of special projects for SCI, he supervised the arrangements, embalmed the president's body and drove the presidential hearse.
"Some people know that I did it, but it's not something I talk about much," he said.
This being Texas, the nonprofit museum is huge, featuring 20,000 square feet of exhibit space, a theater, a commercial kitchen and a dining room that can accommodate hundreds. A gift shop features toy hearses, chocolate caskets, Dead Heat hot sauce and tie tacks in the shape of tiny shovels.
All the facilities are available for rent, "providing a unique and entertaining atmosphere to hold corporate events and parties," according to the museum's Web site.
"We had a wine-tasting group that used to meet here," Boetticher said. "But we've never had a wedding. Unless you are a funeral director, you probably wouldn't be interested."
The museum is not professionally curated, and Boetticher built some of the exhibits himself, lending a high school science-fair quality to some of the displays. That's largely what distinguishes it from its much smaller counterpart, the Museum of Funeral Customs, in Springfield, which has a full-time curator on staff.
"Their presentation style tends to be one of fascination rather than education," said Jon Austin, the director of the Springfield museum, who visited the Houston museum several years ago. "In the Houston case, our sense was that visitors were expected to be impressed by the quantity of material."
Springfield has some purported Lincoln hairs, on loan from a private collector. But Austin said their veracity is dubious, and "to us, that's not really history," so they are not on display.
Probably the Elvis embalming table wouldn't have made the cut there, either.
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(Howard Witt is the Chicago Tribune's Southwest Bureau chief.)
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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
